Based on my personal experiences with drunk people, you're totally right!
Just for fun, there's many scientific studies floating around that say the same thing as you. I'll share a part of an online article by Kathryn Francis at Inverse magazine which summarizes them for easier reading:
"If someone has done something wrong while under the influence of alcohol, we tend to give them a “get out of jail free card,” rather than hold them accountable for their actions. We also extend these excuses to ourselves.
But in our research, we’ve attempted to paint a clearer picture of how drinking alcohol, empathy, and moral behavior are related. In turns out that while consuming alcohol might affect our empathy, making us respond inappropriately to other people’s emotions and reactions, this doesn’t necessarily change our moral standards, or the principles we use to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong.
In a recent experiment, we gave participants shots of vodka and then measured their empathy and their moral decisions. We presented images showing various people expressing emotions to our participants. After having a higher dose of vodka, people began to respond inappropriately to these emotional displays, reporting that they felt positively about sad faces and negatively about happy faces. The more intoxicated people were, the more impaired their empathy became —having a few drinks weakened people’s abilities to understand and share the emotions of others.
But did this then have an effect on their morality?
We had people tell us what they thought they would do in moral dilemmas and then also looked at what they actually did in a simulation of a moral dilemma in virtual reality. Consider what you might do in one of these situations:
A runaway trolley is heading down some rail tracks towards five construction workers who can’t hear it approaching. You’re standing on a footbridge in between the approaching trolley and the workers. In front of you, is standing a very large stranger. If you push this stranger onto the tracks below, their large bulk will stop the trolley. This one person will be killed but the five construction workers will be saved. Would you do it?
While alcohol might have impaired the empathy of our participants, it didn’t have an effect on how they judged these moral situations or how they acted in them. If someone chose to push the person off the footbridge in order to save more lives while sober, they did the same thing when drunk. If people refused to sacrifice the person’s life in the same situation because they believed that killing was wrong regardless of the consequences, they also did the same when drunk.
It turns out that while we might believe that alcohol changes our personalities, it doesn’t. You’re still the same person after a drink — your existing sense of morality left intact.
And so you are responsible for your moral and immoral actions, whether you’ve had a few drinks or not."
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Just for fun, there's many scientific studies floating around that say the same thing as you. I'll share a part of an online article by Kathryn Francis at Inverse magazine which summarizes them for easier reading:
"If someone has done something wrong while under the influence of alcohol, we tend to give them a “get out of jail free card,” rather than hold them accountable for their actions. We also extend these excuses to ourselves.
But in our research, we’ve attempted to paint a clearer picture of how drinking alcohol, empathy, and moral behavior are related. In turns out that while consuming alcohol might affect our empathy, making us respond inappropriately to other people’s emotions and reactions, this doesn’t necessarily change our moral standards, or the principles we use to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong.
In a recent experiment, we gave participants shots of vodka and then measured their empathy and their moral decisions. We presented images showing various people expressing emotions to our participants. After having a higher dose of vodka, people began to respond inappropriately to these emotional displays, reporting that they felt positively about sad faces and negatively about happy faces. The more intoxicated people were, the more impaired their empathy became —having a few drinks weakened people’s abilities to understand and share the emotions of others.
But did this then have an effect on their morality?
We had people tell us what they thought they would do in moral dilemmas and then also looked at what they actually did in a simulation of a moral dilemma in virtual reality. Consider what you might do in one of these situations:
A runaway trolley is heading down some rail tracks towards five construction workers who can’t hear it approaching. You’re standing on a footbridge in between the approaching trolley and the workers. In front of you, is standing a very large stranger. If you push this stranger onto the tracks below, their large bulk will stop the trolley. This one person will be killed but the five construction workers will be saved. Would you do it?
While alcohol might have impaired the empathy of our participants, it didn’t have an effect on how they judged these moral situations or how they acted in them. If someone chose to push the person off the footbridge in order to save more lives while sober, they did the same thing when drunk. If people refused to sacrifice the person’s life in the same situation because they believed that killing was wrong regardless of the consequences, they also did the same when drunk.
It turns out that while we might believe that alcohol changes our personalities, it doesn’t. You’re still the same person after a drink — your existing sense of morality left intact.
And so you are responsible for your moral and immoral actions, whether you’ve had a few drinks or not."